MSI B85M-P33: A Cheap Haswell Motherboard

Written by Michael Larabel in Motherboards on 15 March 2014 at 06:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 7 Comments.

The MSI B85M-P33 is a micro-ATX motherboard that's friendly with latest-generation Intel Haswell processors while the cost of this motherboard will only set you back about $60 USD.

MSI's B85M-P33 is a basic motherboard based around Intel's B85 Express Chipset with support for LGA-1150 Haswell processors. The motherboard doesn't offer any particularly special features but is low-cost, has proven to be reliable with my Linux testing, and its micro-ATX size obviously makes it a good candidate for HTPCs and other SFF builds. I had purchased the B85M-P33 motherboard for our new OpenBenchmarking.org / PTS automated test farm and this board has proven to be reliable in enduring benchmarks near constantly since it was commissioned in late January, so I found it worth doing a write-up on this board for those that may be after a low-cost, micro-ATX Haswell motherboard.

Included with the MSI B85M-P33 motherboard were just the basic accessories we're use to seeing out of low-cost motherboards.

The MSI B85M-P33 has two DDR3-1600MHz DIMM slots that support up to 16GB of RAM, there are two Serial ATA 3.0 ports, two Serial ATA 2.0 ports, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, and one PCI Express x1 slot. Between the PCI-E x16 and PCI-E x1 slot is the CMOS battery so that a dual-slot graphics card can fit on this motherboard without obstructing the secondary slot. Covering the B85 Express chipset was a small heatsink.


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